Top pharmaceutical lobbyist threads a thicket of outrage

Growing outrage in U.S. challenges leading pharmaceutical lobbyist

Stephen Ubl is president and CEO of the Pharm-aceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
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Stephen Ubl is president and CEO of the Pharm-aceutical Research...

WASHINGTON - Few lobbyists have walked into the kind of political inferno that greeted Stephen Ubl when he became the top pitchman for the pharmaceutical industry.

Ubl, the 47-year-old president and chief executive of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, took charge in November, as the Obama administration, presidential candidates, members of Congress, consumer groups, health insurance companies and doctors were criticizing the prescription drug industry for charging prices they saw as exorbitant and excessive. The anger has only grown worse.

"The debate around drug pricing is myopic and misinformed," he said in an interview. "It's myopic because 80 percent of health care costs or more are driven by a small percentage of patients with multiple chronic conditions."

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"And what holds the greatest potential for ameliorating those costs?" he continued. "Better treatments and cures."

If anyone can find areas of agreement with the critics, or at least work productively with them, it may be Ubl. He is more conversant with the intricacies of health policy, and more adept at the politics, than some of his predecessors.

He is in a tricky position, though: He does not explicitly acknowledge that high drug prices are a problem, but he wants to address the uproar caused by new brand-name drugs that cost more than $100,000 a year and old generic drugs whose prices have skyrocketed in recent months.

Consumers and politicians, he says, must not focus on drug costs in isolation but should consider them in the context of national health spending - and the clinical benefits that drugs provide.

Ubl (pronounced YOU-bul) said the drug lobby had been effective at beating back proposals like allowing the government to negotiate drug prices or import medicines from Canada. But, he said, it has not been as good at formulating and advancing a positive agenda. He hopes to change that.

Brand-name drug companies and manufacturers of lower-cost generic drugs have historically been rivals. But Ubl said he wanted the government to speed the approval of generic drugs and approve more of them, reducing a backlog of generic drug applications. Increased competition, he said, would help hold down prices - and could perhaps avoid another outcry like the one over Daraprim, a drug to treat a life-threatening parasitic infection.

Turing Pharmaceuticals, a startup founded by a former hedge fund manager, Martin Shkreli, acquired Daraprim last year and immediately increased the price to $750 a tablet, from $13.50.

"People see a knucklehead like Martin Shkreli raised the price of a 62-year-old drug by 5,000 percent, and they connect the dots in a way that is not helpful or is highly misleading," Ubl said.